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What Both ContraPoints and Blaire White can Learn from Their Debate
The atmosphere was akin to the inside of a volcano despite the very calming aura that both interlocutors of the debate seemed to have.
This is yet another entry in the long standing book of “Why proudly trans people should never debate TERF’s”. What we witnessed was simply ContraPoints trying to fight fire with fire, when the audience was capable of identifying the positions of bad faith Blaire White was taking in regards to the debate.
What I seemed to gather from watching it was that Blaire White thinks trans identity, or at least the veracity of one completely hinges on biological truths, and that’s ironically, not true.
Blaire White, like many of her supporters, seem to ignore that gender is not an arbitrary designation of gender one attaches to themselves the minute they exit their parent’s womb. If anything, we lack any semblance of consent on what and who we choose to be. The absence of consent in such a decision is the first sign that there’s about to be a clash between perceived personality and the one we actually would want to project into this world.
No matter how many times ContraPoints would wave the DSM-5 in front of Blaire White, she would not quite want to understand what the scientific consensus on the concept of gender identity would entail. What prompted the change to the most recent DSM in the first place if people might recall, is the fact that trans people were simply better off having their experiences examined from a curious lens rather than a dismissive and a pseudo-christian one. I struggled a little bit to find any meat to the debate to be perfectly honest. ContraPoints would present some very concise and clear evidence that Blaire’s words are bullshit in practical terms, but what we instead seem to be getting is just regurgitated words of “Well, if you’re born this way then…” No Blaire White. Gender doesn’t work that way.
I go on to retroactively explain it in future blog posts, and in my coming out story that much of what being trans is, isn’t just conforming to cis people’s conceptions of what gender is-a bunch of body parts that determine you’re a girl or a boy, and nothing in-between. Gender is the very absence of a face…
